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Art Thieves and Crazy Granny
Laurent's Report Edu, Jordan Summers, Siraj Sharma and I all decided to investigate a missing Van Gogh painting - the "Iris" - which had been stolen from the Ghetti art museum. After meeting at the Dutch Master bar, we visited the museum to see if we could learn anything from the scene of the crime, and in the process of attempting to gain entry, I had a very minor altercation with security, which Edu ended up joining in with, and from which Siraj had the intelligence to extricate us. Jordan, who I hadn't quite realised had been missing, rejoined us. He said that the FBI had been investigating a string of art pieces' thievery, of which this was the most recent. Later that day, Siraj told us that he had done some Google-ing, and that he had found some security footage showing the Iris at the docks, being loaded onto a boat - the Starry Night. The next day, we went to the docks, and staked them out, seeing that the Starry Night was anchored in the bay, a ways off shore. We also realised none of us had swum much recently, and spent the afternoon practicing, before stashing our bulky belongings on the beach that evening. Siraj had supplied us with (I think he must have some major connections with shady folk to get all the things he gets. It's kinda scary, actually.) diving gear to allow us to swim out to the boat undetected. Anyway, with our stuff stashed and us all suited up, we started to swim out after the sun had set, but part-way to the boat, my airtube disconnected, and I was forced to surface, of course alerting the people on the boat of my presence. I was shot, and managed to swim back to the beach, luckily not getting shot again. When I reached the shore, I found Melanie, and kept an eye (a scoped eye, no less) on the yacht deck, watching chaos unfold as Jordan seemed to dance or something, some guys got shot by Edu and Siraj, and one of the "bad guys" got captured and tied up. Then the darndest thing happened - I started seing the light from what looked like machinegun fire, and all of the rest of my party had to run for cover. An old lady walked into view, somehow keeping a machinegun under control. I manage to shoot her knee off, and she goes down, but keeps firing until all the ammo in the gun's run out, and the rest of the party all managed to stay out of the bullets' paths. Turns out that they were Russians, hired by a guy called the Curator to steal the Iris. Somewhat suspiciously, they had a map showing where the Curator was, and it happened to be in Los Angeles. We looked it up later on Google Street View ™, and it was a warehouse. We went to the warehouse the next afternoon, and after a little snooping and poor-person-bribing, we found out that a guy seemed to live in there, alone. We went in, and found the Curator, alone. The Curator was very accomodating, letting us look at a rather large collection of near-priceless original paintings by various very famous artists from throughout history, and although we weren't allowed to take the Iris, we were given a tablet which was apparantly of some small importance for posterity.